The Kassa Gambit (6 page)

The medallion unfolded in her hand, stretching out into a handle, and the blade sprung free. Ten centimeters long and as light as a feather, it was the sharpest edge Prudence had ever seen, heard of, or read about. Her father had claimed it was a single molecule thick. It would cut through hardened steel as easily as through water.

A ridiculously dangerous object to give to a child. But her father had trusted her, had known she would treat it with the respect it deserved.

Letting it collapse into a disk again, she dropped it into a pocket of the suit, where she could reach it in a hurry.

“Are we ready?” Kyle was eager, despite his exhaustion.

She responded by punching the air lock release.

FOUR

Discoveries

Standing in the air lock, he checked the magazine on his rifle. Visibly, so she would see him doing it. Letting her know he had a functional weapon might prevent her from trying anything stupid. Her switch-up had been smoothly done, but he’d memorized the serial numbers of both weapons. An old cop habit, born out of the fact that professional-grade weapons imprinted their serial number on every round they fired. Knowing who had shot who was the sort of thing cops liked to know.

Call it lessons from cop school. Making sure everyone knew the consequences of starting a fight was the best way to stop one. Making sure everyone understood they would be held accountable for every shot they fired was the best way to make them shoot carefully.

Of course, that was on Altair, where squads of SWAT goons were a panic button away and forensics teams would pore over every square inch of the crime scene. Out here, on a primitive planet in the middle of an arctic blizzard, the rules might be different.

The lock cycled, exposing them to the outside. The big one, Jorgun, reached up to toggle his helmet mike.

Kyle put out a hand and stopped him. “Radio silence. Don’t let them know we’re coming.” He had to shout over the howling wind. Jorgun nodded, accepting the rebuke without reacting to it.

They trudged outside, sinking up to their knees. Jorgun stared up at the sky, entranced by the swirling patterns of snowflakes. Melvin was hardly more effective, wading clumsily through the snow.

But she slipped out of the lock, alert and aware, her eyes scanning the horizon carefully, looking up to make sure nothing had crept onto the ship above them.

As tired as he was, he found himself grinning. They should have hired a better actress. Instead, they’d sent a special operative to make sure he did whatever it was the League wanted him to do out here. She was good at her job; too good. She’d given herself away with her industrial-strength wariness, the trained habits of the professionally suspicious.

He’d do whatever they wanted, play his part to the hilt. He had to: she wouldn’t let him get away with anything less. He just hoped that they wanted something other than him dead.

Gripping the mag rifle, he reflexively glanced at the magazine indicator, checking it again.

They spread out into a short line and struggled ahead. She’d given the handheld locator to Jorgun, so they all followed his lead. At first Kyle had thought that was rather coldhearted of her to put the dumb guy in front. But now he saw why. Following him, she could watch over him while still searching for any threat. If he was behind her, trying to keep track of him would just be a distraction.

She managed her crew like a well-trained team. Which surprised him, given that they clearly weren’t operatives themselves. The big one might be putting on an act, pretending to be stupid, but the other one, Melvin, was just plain clueless. Nobody could act that vacuous.

Jorgun was going too fast. The giant plowed through the snow, his eyes locked on his locator unit, unaware that no one could keep up. Kyle flipped up his faceplate to yell at him, but the wind whistled in and drowned his shout. He pushed harder against the snow, but the giant was leaving them behind.

Kyle started thinking about breaking radio silence. It would be better than losing anyone out here in this blizzard. The suits were rated for the cold of space, but that was when they were insulated by the vacuum. He could feel his feet going numb as the clinging snow leached the heat out. A few hours out here would be fatal.

Something flew past him. Instinctively he dropped, spinning to see where it had come from, bringing the rifle to his shoulder.

Prudence was making another snowball. She glanced at him curiously before throwing it. This time her aim was better, and it hit Jorgun in the back of the head.

The giant turned around, and Prudence made a very simple hand signal. Kyle could guess it meant “slow.”

It was too simple. No operative would have such an obvious combat signal. No self-respecting soldier would have charged off without checking on the rest of his team in the first place. It was almost like they were just ordinary people, just a ragtag crew under a young but fiercely determined captain.

Kyle had not survived this long by taking things at face value. There was always a hidden catch, always another angle. There had been a time when he trusted people, but then he’d become a cop. Now he just assumed the hook was there, and didn’t stop searching until he found it. So far, he’d never been disappointed.

He looked back reflexively, checking behind, and froze. They couldn’t have gone more than fifty meters, but the ship was already hidden in white-flecked gray emptiness.

Rapping the rifle against his helmet made a metallic clink that carried through the wind. Prudence heard, glancing over to see what his problem was. Pointing the way they had come, he shrugged a question.

She waved a hand, dismissing his fear, and kept moving.

Damn, but she was a cool one.

Up ahead, Jorgun had stopped. He stood like a tree, the most visible element in the landscape. Melvin floundered up to him and stopped, at the edge of a crater, staring down.

Prudence came close enough to touch helmets, the old spacer’s trick. He could hear her through the vibration of her faceplate on his. “Looks like they found something.”

Even through the weather, the suits, the plexiglass of the faceplate, his body thrilled at the intimate proximity. She was beautiful, in a thin, unusual way, but that wasn’t it. He’d been close to pretty women before.

It was her attitude, her deep confidence masked by extreme caution. She thought about everything before she did it, treated every act like a carefully chosen move in a chess game. It was a way of life he had learned to embrace, once he had gone undercover against the League. A game where one wrong move could spell detection, disaster, and death.

He wondered if the stakes were as high for her as they were for him.

She was waiting for him, patiently. Waiting until he realized he had to go first. She already had committed her crew. She couldn’t join them, stand there in a tight knot where a single burst of auto-fire could kill them all.

So he had to go up there. He had to put himself at risk. And if the crew were just mooks, if they were expendables hired to die with him, whose only role was to get him to commit himself, then he would be dead in the next thirty seconds. Either the enemy lying in wait would blast him out of existence, or she would cut him down with a spray of needle-sized bullets from the mag rifle he’d given her.

Regretfully, he wished he’d only borrowed one rifle from the
Launceston.

He didn’t have a choice. He had become used to doing things without choices, but it was difficult to pull away from her, to have to walk forward without seeing her face. If he was going to die, he wanted to see the face of the person who killed him. Or maybe he just wanted to see
her
face. Too tired to puzzle out the difference, he trudged forward mechanically, continuing on his chosen course long after he’d forgotten why he’d chosen it.

When he got up to where the other two were standing, he knew he was going to live. The wreckage in front of him changed everything.

The ship was small, no more than ten meters long. Battered and cracked like a child’s toy dropped from the sky, but still in one piece. It looked like a bizarrely elongated snowflake: six fat tubes stacked together hexagonally on the inside, and outside a ring of six thin tubes. At the rear was what had to be a fusion nozzle. At the front was a glass pod, like a huge insect eye, multifaceted and staring, shattered on one side. The vessel was still and quiet, but it radiated menace.

Not the menace of a warship, even though it almost certainly was one. The
Launceston
was far more intimidating, with its bristling gunports and racks of missiles. But the
Launceston
was solid and sleek, every surface polished and smooth. This ship was like a spider web’s nightmare, the struts and spars that held it together as gnarled and lumpy as wood, unsettlingly organic in their texture.

Alien.

The word came to mind, unwelcome but undeniable. The ship in front of them shrieked it in the sheer incomprehensibility of its design.

In all the centuries since Earth, on all the planets and moons intrepid explorers found and conquered, mankind had never met its equal. Or even the equal of an ant colony. Life was common enough: simple bacteria, plants, the occasional mollusk. But nothing organized. Nothing
social.

Man stood alone as a sentient race, looking into the mirror of the universe and seeing only his own reflection. A miracle without explanation, a blessing of no competition or a curse of loneliness, depending on your point of view. Was it improbable that no other planet had been climatically stable enough long enough to make society, or was the improbability that Earth had? Philosophers argued, scientists washed their hands of the insolvable, and ordinary people relaxed in the knowledge that the closet was empty: there was no bogeyman hiding in the dark.

But here the broken eye of alien intelligence stared back at him. And it was hostile. First Contact had come in the form of a lethal attack.

Jorgun shouted above the wind, childish wonder in his voice. “Who made that?”

A fine question, even if the answer was obvious:
not us.
But Kyle’s mind was obsessed with a different question. A subtle question, one that an untrained or merely unsuspicious mind might have overlooked.

Who had given the League that anonymous tip? The one that had sent him out here, on a twelve-day trip, just in time to discover an attack seven days old.

The tip had been given before the attack had taken place.

Someone human knew this attack was going to happen. Someone human had sent him out here to discover the aftermath. Someone human knew the answer to Jorgun’s question. And they weren’t sharing.

Prudence had come up behind him, and was staring down at the wreck. He studied her face carefully. But the operative was gone, replaced by a frightened young woman. She glared back at him accusingly, demanding that his badge and his authority make sense of the tragedy that lay in front of them. The same look so many victims had given him over the years. No actress could fake that heartbroken glare, that shattered innocence, that instinctive need for someone to explain how ordinary life had suddenly become nightmare. He’d nailed a dozen murderers simply because they had failed this test. When confronted with the body, they could fake the loss, the grief, the sorrow, but they couldn’t fake the outrage that their predictable world no longer made sense. They could pretend to lament the deceased, but not the death of meaning.

She didn’t know the answer.

“Fucking aliens.” Melvin screamed over the blizzard. “Aliens! Pru, what the hell are we gonna do?”

“Is it the Dog-Men of Ophiuchi Seven? Because I thought their ships were shaped like giant wolves.” Jorgun was talking about some space-opera comic show that ran on the low-grade entertainment channels. From a normal man, Kyle would have suspected irrationality born of fear; from a clever mind, satire from much the same source. But Jorgun’s voice was smooth and even. Of all the people here, he was the only one who did not shudder. Protected by his Zen-like innocence, while the rest of them teetered on the brink of the unthinkable.

“This isn’t a fucking vid show, you idiot!” Melvin’s outrage didn’t sting. It wasn’t directed at Jorgun, but at the alien ship, the war-shattered colony, the entire universe itself. Even the simpleminded giant could tell that. He didn’t flinch, but just asked his next question, obviousness having been transformed into insight by the impossibility of the scene.

“Are you sure? It feels like a vid show.”

Yes, Kyle thought, it did. It felt like one of those prank shows, where people were put in ridiculous situations and secretly filmed for their comedic reactions.

Except a lot of people had died to set up this gag.

Prudence’s voice was carefully neutral. “What
are
we going to do, Commander?” She watched him patiently, wearing a ghost of a smirk, challenging his authority, mocking his confusion, demanding that he lead, follow, or get out of the way.

The men who ran the League would mark her out for that, put her name on the list of Undesirables. The list of people to silence, while they took control. The people to make disappear, once they had it.

That list that was already too short, depopulated not by threats and subterfuge, but by bribery and innate laziness. Sometimes he wondered if anyone would notice when the League finally won and seized absolute power. If the price of a vid and a beer didn’t go up, would they even care?

Prudence was an attitude he had stopped expecting to find. Complacency was easy on a rich world like Altair. Looking the other way when the price of looking deeper got too high. Letting someone else take care of things because they’d always done such a good job of it before.

In the presence of her piercing eyes, entranced by the shapely lips that almost smiled but not quite, trembling as if they could burst into laughter or disdain at any instant, he could not stop his mask from slipping. He spoke honestly, from the heart, without calculation.

“We’re going to go down there and take a closer look.”